THE BOOKS OF TRUTH BEING POSSIBLY ON YOUR SIDE

Wild geese are flying through loopholes. If you don’t look, the blue loopholes cease to exist. If you don’t fill the holes, the winged truth will not stop flapping.

You are not your only object: stir up, the self will dissolve into magma, for love or some volcano. If you don’t erupt, the vessels concealed will not be made known.

Your truth is a goose in flight, encountering the vast expanse, the miraculous becomes a state of mind. My truth is a rope, rough to a certain extent, I will whip the wolves bursting out of my body, running in the cries of geese.

ZANG Di

ZANG Di (pseudonym of ZANG Li), born 1964, is a lecturer in Chinese Literature in Beijing is counted as one of China’s best contemporary poets. He has published books of poetry and edited several influential anthologies, translations and poetry magazines.

His work combines Chinese and international literary and cultural traditions in an ingenious way. His complex, multi-layered texts are frequently described as avant-garde poetry. He was in fact one of the first Chinese poets to turn away both from the sentimentalist tradition and the open social criticism of 90s poetry in China and take a more experimental postmodern approach. With great technical skill, associative ease and astounding wordplays, he probes the limits of language. This combination of dry tone, complexity of thought and humour has made ZANG Di an inspiration in China for a whole generation of young poets. Although he has won many prizes in China for his work, he is still too little known internationally.